The Iron Legion
by DeusZedMachina
Summary: One cold October day, the Giant visited a quiet town in Maine and changed that town forever. That was twenty-five years ago, and since then, the world has collectively turned a blind eye to that October day. But more of them have arrived in those twenty-five years, and Hogarth Hughes is being forced to accept a reality he tried to ignore. The Giant will not let him forget.
1. Waiting

**One: Waiting**

* * *

It opened its eyes. Symbols it didn't recognize zig-zagged their way across its vision, mirroring the snowflakes falling around it. It could distinguish shapes in the snow, shadows that slowly inched, crawled, rolled, and dragged themselves towards it. They moved to the rhythm of the red light at the top of its head. It stood-no, it tried to, but it didn't have arms, or legs, or even a body. It was merely a head; a cold, dying head in the middle of the arctic, its twitching limbs scattered about it the snow.

Time passed. Well, maybe time passed, and maybe no time passed at all. Regardless of how long it took, it waited. That was all it could do. That was almost all it knew. It knew how to wait, and it knew that it had to find something. It had to find the boy. Didn't it? Or did it _want_ to find the boy? Yes, it _wanted_, and even though something in its head said no, it couldn't want, it _wanted._ It wanted to have its arms and legs back and it wanted to stand up and it wanted to be warm and it wanted to return to the boy and it didn't want to be moving just yet because the self-repair protocols hadn't finished yet.

Wait. Yes, yes, it was moving. Its field of view shifted, and suddenly, it was far above its arms and legs and partially-reassembled body. It shifted again, and now it faced another human, the first human it had seen in one-hundred and thirteen-point-three-seven-eight planetary cycles (or maybe it had only been moments?). This human was operating a vehicle, like the ones that had hurled pointed metal things at it and made its back and chest hurt. Those memories were bad. They triggered its defensive protocols, only it couldn't engage its defensive protocols because its self-repair protocols hadn't finished yet. It felt itself descend and then it stopped moving, and soon after that, it was dark.

When it could see again, it was still dark, but not as dark as it had once been. It could feel its body beneath its neck, the ground beneath its feet. But it could not move. It was hungry, so hungry, but it could not move. Its vision was fading and the symbols that danced about in the darkness did so frantically and yet rhythmically, flashing red and white and growing and shrinking. Then it was dark again.

* * *

Author's note: This is my first real work of writing published for an audience this wide, so please feel free to leave a review!


	2. Questions

**Two: Questions**

* * *

Snow crunched and crumbled under the black sedan's tires as it pulled into the driveway of a rural cabin in the Rocky Mountains. The car came to a stop just in front of the home, and as the tires caught the gravel packed underneath the snow, its driver sighed. How many of these assignments had he been sent on so far? Forty-one, he recalled. This would be number forty-two. He pulled out his notepad and pen and scribbled out the details of this particular visit in the appropriate fields printed on the pad:

Incident #: _42_

Date: _Nov. 16, 1982_

Date of detection: _Nov.14, 1982_

Estimated date of impact: _Nov. 14, 1982_

Location of impact: _Colorado Rocky Mountains, 37 N, -107 W_

He'd worry about the rest when he actually spoke to the eyewitness. He made sure his book and pen were stowed away in the inside pocket of his jacket, then opened the car door and was met with a wave of below-zero Colorado air that elicited from him a breath of surprise. Not that he wasn't used to the cold-his years of life in Maine could attest to that. He steeled himself, trudged over to the front door, and knocked.

"Hm? Hello?" a red-haired woman in sleepwear answered groggily with a rub of her eyes.

"Good morning, ma'am," the man said. "I'm Professor Hogarth Hughes with the US Geological Survey. Mind if I come in?"

There was a pause while the shivering woman rubbed her hands together and stuffed them in her armpits.

"What? Oh yeah, sorry. Yeah, come in. God, it's freezing."

A minute or so later, Hogarth sat in the living room while the woman, who had introduced herself as Amelia, brought coffee to the table. Hogarth took a mug by the handle and sipped it just enough to feel the warmth of the drink without burning the inside of his mouth. Amelia held hers in both hands and stared into its frothy contents. She was the one to break the silence.

"So, I suppose you want to know about the meteor?"

Hogarth let out a breath he had been holding. He had regurgitated that nonsense about "strange objects or events" and "things you would describe as extraordinary" enough times already to fill fifty of the standard-issue notepads agents carried around.

"Yes," he replied, pulling out his own notepad and pen once more and looking up at Amelia. "I take it you've to spoken to people about this before?"

Amelia nodded.

"I suppose you'll want to start where they started, then," she said. "It was Sunday night, 'round eight o'clock. I was watching the news when I saw a bright light outside my window. I pulled up the blinds to get a better look and saw what it was. The day had been stormy, and I guess I would've noticed the thing earlier if it weren't for the stormclouds. Only reason I didn't think it was lightning was that it got brighter instead of fading right away.

"I'd heard about meteors and how much damage they can do when they hit the ground, but this one was so close I didn't think I could get away in time. So I just kinda watched it. I was scared for my life, yeah, but I was so scared I was frozen, y'know? Couldn't move. So I just watched it."

She stopped to take a sip of her coffee.

"Then, and this is where most people dismiss me, I swear it slowed down. I know meteors slow down from air resistance or whatever, but this one slowed down more than I think it should have. Good thing, too, otherwise I would probably be dead. There was this really bright light when it hit, so I covered my eyes. Couldn't get a good look at the thing after that 'cause it'd fallen past the edge of the mountains.

"I was too tired and shocked to go down into the valley then, so the next day, I hiked down there, and it was gone. There were trucks, all carrying things covered in tarps. Guy in a black jacket asked me some questions, then politely shooed me off. There were more people asking me questions later in the afternoon, and then I went to bed, not knowing what to think. Nothing really happened in the night or anything, and then you showed up. Still don't know what to think."

"Right, okay…" Hogarth muttered, jotting down a few more details in his notepad. "Was there anyone else with you in the house at the time? Friends? Relatives? Romantic partners? Anyone else in the area who might've seen the object?"

"No," Amelia answered. "Just me living 'round here."

And so far, he had learned...absolutely nothing he hadn't known already, aside from the fact that Amelia made some decent coffee. It was like the agency thought asking people the same questions enough times would pressure them into giving them more information. Someone would undoubtedly be visiting poor Amelia again this afternoon, and maybe even the morning after that, if Hogarth couldn't do anything about it.

"Alright," he said as he stood. "thank you for your hospitality, ma'am, but I should go."

Amelia stood as well and placed her coffee on the tray. Hogarth was at the door when she spoke again.

"Before you go. You aren't really from the USGS, are you?"

He caught himself. Nobody had asked him that before, but he figured there was no point in trying to keep his cover anymore.

"You got me there," he admitted. No, he wasn't really from the USGS.

A contented smile tugged at the corners of Amelia's lips.

"If it's any good," she said, "you were a lot nicer than the other ones."

Hogarth nodded and chuckled a little under his breath.

"Yeah, I guess I don't operate quite like some of my coworkers. Well, have a nice day, and call this number if anything else happens. I'm assuming I don't have to try and tell you why it isn't the normal USGS number."

He handed her a small business card with the USGS logo and a ten-digit phone number, and this time he got as far as his car before she stopped him.

"Wait, you should know," she called, "the TV signal went out right before it hit. When it came back on, something different was on. It was like...like I dunno, some weird sci-fi flick. There were these big robots, and they were marching around a burning city. It went back to the regular program after that, so it wasn't part of the schedule, but I didn't really think anything of it until now."

She shivered.

"That's new," Hogarth muttered, more to himself than Amelia. Maybe the agency's methods worked better than he gave them credit for. "Thanks. But, uh, I really should go."

He clambered into the car and started it up, waving as he pulled out of the driveway. Everything from then until the plane touched down in Nowhere, Texas was a tired blur set against a burnt, red sky and an army of Giants.


	3. Tinkerer

**Three: Tinkerer**

* * *

It was frustrating how intriguing it had once been to poke around inside a Giant's head. Jamie liked working with computers, but fiddling with the same computer nonstop for almost two months (god, it really_ had_ been two months) got boring when he had entirely exhausted all viable means of trying to crack the damn thing. Every day, he'd climb a corrugated metal staircase and spend hours elbow-deep in Number Forty-One's circuitry trying to find out just what made these invaders from mars tick, all to little avail.

But something new was waiting for him on the sixteenth of November when he passed through the security checkpoint and into the hangar-sized chamber he and his fellow tinkerers called a workshop.

"That doesn't look like Forty-One."

"You've been reassigned."

Jamie glanced to his left and found a tall man in a dark suit; not an unusual sight when one worked with giant alien robots on a day-to-day basis, but he didn't recognize this particular spook.

"You'll be working with Forty-Two here until further notice," the suited man continued, gesturing at the metal head behind him.

Jamie knit his brows and scrutinized Forty-Two.

"It has an antenna," he observed.

"One of a few reasons we'd like you to have a look at this one," the man said. "We believe it sent out a transmission shortly after we shot it down."

"But you use flux compression generators to disable them. Wouldn't the EMP overload any transmitters?"

"It didn't, and we want to know why. That's also why security's tighter today."

Jamie had seen more guards than usual, now that he thought about it. If Forty-Two had managed to dodge the full effects of an EMP, he supposed it might have a few other dangerous tricks up its sleeves.

"So what exactly did it transmit?" he asked.

"According to our eyewitness," the man replied, "a call to arms."

Jamie's heart missed a beat. He had seen the footage from Rockwell. Forty of those walking engines of destruction, plus the ones recovered by countries outside the US's jurisdiction...he didn't like to think about the damage an army like that could cause, especially considering one of them had survived a _nuclear blast._

"That's...scary," he muttered.

"To say the least," the spook agreed.

There was a long pause, the atmosphere growing more and more tense with each passing second.

"Right," he exclaimed finally with a clap of his hands. "let's get started, then. Oh, and before I forget, who's Forty-Two's Overseer?"

"That would be me," the man answered. "You can call me Overseer Kent Mansley."


End file.
